“It didn’t hurt it much.”
“When they’re my trees,” he said, “they’re coming down.”
“They won’t be your trees.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Mama’s not leaving the place to you, Dan.”
“I thought what’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.”
“I love those trees,” I said. “I’m not going to see them cut.” His face darkened, and a muscle worked in his jaw. This was a warning sign, and I knew it as such, but I was stuck in a pattern, God help me, and I couldn’t leave it alone. “First you’d sell off the timber,” I said, “and then you’d sell off the acreage.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Why? Your daddy did.”
Dan grew up on a farm that came down through his father’s father. Unable to make a living farming, first his grandfather and then his father had sold off parcels of land little by little, whittling away at their holdings and each time reducing the potential income of what remained. After Dan’s mother died his father had stopped farming altogether and drank full time, and the farm was auctioned for back taxes while Dan was still in high school.
I knew what it would do to him and yet I threw that in his face all the same. I couldn’t seem to help it, any more than he could help what followed.
At breakfast the next day the silence made me want to scream. Dan read the paper while he ate, then hurried out the door without a word. I couldn’t hear the screen door when it banged shut or the car engine when it started up. Mama’s silence—and his, and mine—drowned out everything else.
I thought I’d burst when we were doing the dishes. She didn’t say a word and neither did I. Afterward she turned to me and said, “I didn’t go to college so I don’t know about patterns, or what you do and what it makes him do.”
The quattrocento and rats in a maze, that’s all I learned in college. What I know about patterns and family violence I learned watching Oprah and Phil Donahue, and she watched the same programs I did. (“He blacked your eye and broke your nose. He kicked you in the stomach while you were pregnant. How can you stay with a brute like this?” “But I love him, Geraldo. And I know he loves me.”)
“I just know one thing,” she said. “It won’t get better. And it will get worse.”
“No.”
“Yes. And you know it, Tildie.”
“No.”
He hadn’t blacked my eye or broken my nose, but he had hammered my face with his fists and it was swollen and discolored. He hadn’t kicked me in the stomach but he had shoved me from him. I had been clinging to his arm. That was stupid, I knew better than to do that, it drove him crazy to have me hang on him like that. He had shoved me and I’d gone sprawling, wrenching my leg when I fell on it. My knee ached now, and the muscles in the front of that thigh were sore. And my rib cage was sore where he’d punched me.
But I love him, Geraldo, Oprah, Phil. And I know he loves me.
That night he didn’t come home.
I couldn’t sit still, couldn’t catch my breath. Livia caught my anxiety and wouldn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep. I held her in my arms and paced the floor in front of the television set. Back and forth, back and forth.
At midnight finally I put her in her crib and she slept. Mama was playing solitaire at the pine table. Only the top is pine, the base is maple. An antique, Dan pronounced it when he first saw it, and better than the ones in the shops. I suppose he had it priced in his mind, along with the walnut trees.
I pointed out a move. Mama said, “I know about that. I just haven’t decided whether I want to do it, that’s all.” But she always says that. I don’t believe she saw it.
At one I heard our car turn off the road and onto the gravel. She heard it, too, and gathered up the cards and said she was tired now, she’d just turn in. She was out of the room and up the stairs before he came in the door.
He was drunk. He lurched into the room, his shirt open halfway to his waist, his eyes unfocused. He said, “Oh, Jesus, Tildie, what’s happening to us?”
“Shhh,” I said. “You’ll wake the baby.”
“I’m sorry, Tildie,” he said. “I’m sorry, I’m so goddam sorry.”
Going up the stairs, he spun away from me and staggered into the railing. It held. I got him upstairs and into our room, but he passed out the minute he lay down on our bed. I got his shoes off, and his shirt and pants, and let him sleep in his socks and underwear.
In the morning he was still sleeping when I got up to take care of Livia. Mama had his breakfast on the table, his coffee poured, the newspaper at his place. He rushed through the kitchen without a word to anybody, tore out the door, and was gone. I moved toward the door but Mama was in my path.
I cried, “Mama, he’s leaving! He’ll never be back!”
She glanced meaningfully at Livia. I stepped back, lowered my voice. “He’s leaving,” I said, helpless. He had started the car, he was driving away. “I’ll never see him again.”
“He’ll be back.”
“Just like my daddy,” I said. “Livvy, your father’s gone, we’ll never see him again.”
“Stop that,” Mama said. “You don’t know how much sticks in their minds. You mind what you say in front of her.”
“But it’s true.”
“It’s not,” she said. “You won’t lose him that easy. He’ll be back.”
In the afternoon I took Livia with me while I picked pole beans and summer squash. Then we went back to the pear and apple orchard and played in the shade. After a while I took her over to Grandma Yount’s grave. We’ll all be here someday, I wanted to say, your grandma and your daddy and your mama, too. And you’ll be here when your time comes. This is our land, this is where we all end up.
I might have said this, it wouldn’t hurt for her to hear it, but for what Mama said. I guess it’s true you don’t know what sticks in their minds, or what they’ll make of it.
She liked it out there, Livia did. She crawled right up to Grandma Yount’s stone and ran her hand over it. You’d have thought she was trying to read it that way, like a blind person with Braille.
He didn’t come home for dinner. It was going on ten when I heard the car on the gravel. Mama and I were watching television. I got up and went into the kitchen to be there when he came in.
He was sober. He stood in the doorway and looked at me. Every emotion a man could have was there on his face.
“Look at you,” he said. “I did that to you.”
My face was worse than the day before. Bruises and swellings are like that, taking their time to ripen.
“You missed dinner,” I said, “but I saved some for you. I’ll heat up a plate for you.”
“I already ate. Tildie, I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not right. We have to talk.”
We slipped up to our room, leaving Mama to the television set. With our door closed we talked about the patterns we were caught in and how we seemed to have no control, like actors in a play with all their lines written for them by someone else. We could improvise, we could invent movements and gestures, we could read our lines in any of a number of ways, but the script was all written down and we couldn’t get away from it.
I mentioned counseling. He said, “I called that place in Fulton City. I wouldn’t tell them my name. Can you feature that? I called them for help but I was too ashamed to tell them my name.”
“What did they say?”
“They would want to see us once a week as a couple, and each of us individually once a week. Total price for the three sessions would be eighty dollars.”
“For how long?”
“I asked. They couldn’t say. They said it’s not the sort of change you can expect to make overnight.”
I said, “Eighty dollars a week. We can’t afford that.”
“I had the feeling they might reduce it some.”
&nbs
p; “Did you make an appointment?”
“No. I thought I’d call tomorrow.”
“I don’t want to cut the trees,” I said. He looked at me. “To pay for it. I don’t want to cut Mama’s walnut trees.”
“Tildie, who brought up the damn trees?”
“We could sell the table,” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“In the kitchen. The pine-top table, didn’t you say it was an antique? We could sell that.”
“Why would I want to sell the table?”
“You want to sell those trees bad enough. You as much as said that as soon as my mama dies you’ll be out back with a chain saw.”
“Don’t start with me,” he said. “Don’t you start with me, Tildie.”
“Or what? Or you’ll hit me? Oh, God, Dan, what are we doing? Fighting over how to pay for the counseling to keep from fighting. Dan, what’s the matter with us?”
I went to embrace him but he backed away from me. “Honey,” he said, “we better be real careful with this. They were telling me about escalating patterns of violence. I’m afraid of what could happen. I’m going to do what they said to do.”
“What’s that?”
“I want to pack some things,” he said. “That’s what I came home to do. There’s that Welcome Inn Motel outside of Caldwell, they say it’s not so bad and I believe they have weekly rates.”
“No,” I said. “No.”
“They said it’s best. Especially if we’re going to start counseling, because that brings everything up and out into the open, and it threatens the part of us that wants to be in this pattern. Tildie, from what they said it’d be dangerous for us to be together right now.”
“You can’t leave,” I said.
“I wouldn’t be five miles away. I’d be coming for dinner some nights, we’d be going to a movie now and then. It’s not like—”
“We can’t afford it,” I said. “Dan, how can we afford it? Eighty dollars a week for the counseling and God knows how much for the motel, and you’d be having most of your meals out, and how can we afford it? You’ve got a decent job but you don’t make that kind of money.”
His eyes hardened but he breathed in and out, in and out, and said, “Tildie, just talking like this is a strain, don’t you see that? We can afford it, we’ll find a way to afford it. Tildie, don’t grab on to my arm like that, you know what it does to me. Tildie, stop it, will you for God’s sake stop it?”
I put my arms around my own self and hugged myself. I was shaking. My hands just wanted to take hold of his arm. What was so bad about holding on to your husband’s arm? What was wrong with that?
“Don’t go,” I said.
“I have to.”
“Not now. It’s late, they won’t have any rooms left anyhow. Wait until morning. Can’t you wait until morning?”
“I was just going to get some of my things and go.”
“Go in the morning. Don’t you want to see Livvy before you go? She’s your daughter, don’t you want to say good-bye to her?”
“I’m not leaving, Tildie. I’m just staying a few miles from here so we’ll have a chance to keep from destroying ourselves. My God, Tildie, I don’t want to leave you. That’s the whole point, don’t you see that?”
“Stay until morning,” I said. “Please?”
“And will we go through this again in the morning?”
“No,” I said. “I promise.”
We were both restless, but then we made love and that settled him, and soon he was sleeping. I couldn’t sleep, though. I lay there for a time, and then I put a robe on and went down to the kitchen and sat there for a long time, thinking of patterns, thinking of ways to escape them. And then I went back up the stairs to the bedroom again.
I was in the kitchen the next morning before Livia woke up. I was there when Mama came down, and her eyes widened at the sight of me. She started to say something but then I guess she saw something in my eyes and she stayed silent.
I said, “Mama, we have to call the police. You’ll mind the baby when they come for me. Will you do that?”
“Oh, Tildie,” she said.
I led her up the stairs again and into our bedroom. Dan lay facedown, the way he always slept. I drew the sheet down and showed her where I’d stabbed him, slipping the kitchen knife between two ribs and into the heart. The knife lay on the table beside the bed. I had wiped the blood from it. There had not been very much blood to wipe.
“He was going to leave,” I said, “and I couldn’t bear it, Mama. And I thought, Now he won’t leave, now he’ll never leave me. I thought, This is a way to break the pattern. Isn’t that crazy, Mama? It doesn’t make any sense, does it?”
“My poor Tildie.”
“Do you want to know something? I feel safe now, Mama. He won’t hit me anymore and I never have to worry about him leaving me. He can’t leave me, can he?” Something caught in my throat. “Oh, and he’ll never hold me again, either. In the circle of his arms.”
I broke then, and it was Mama who held me, stroking my forehead, soothing me. I was all right then, and I stood up straight and told her she had better call the police.
“Livia’ll be up any minute now,” she said. “I think she’s awake, I think I heard her fussing a minute ago. Change her and bring her down and feed her her breakfast.”
“And then?”
“And then put her in for her nap.”
After I put Livia back in her crib for her nap Mama told me that we weren’t going to call the police. “Now that you’re back where you belong,” she said, “I’m not about to see them take you away. Your baby needs her mama and I need you, too.”
“But Dan—”
“Bring the big wheelbarrow around to the kitchen door. Between the two of us we can get him down the stairs. We’ll dig his grave in the back, we’ll bury him here on our land. People won’t suspect anything. They’ll just think he went off, the way men do.”
“The way my daddy did,” I said.
Somehow we got him down the stairs and out through the kitchen. The hardest part was getting him into the old wheelbarrow. I checked Livia and made sure she was sleeping soundly, and then we took turns with the barrow, wheeling it out beyond the kitchen garden.
“What I keep thinking,” I said, “is at least I broke the pattern.”
She didn’t say anything, and what she didn’t say became one of her famous silences, sucking up all the sound around us. The barrow’s wheel squeaked, the birds sang in the trees, but now I couldn’t hear any of that.
Suddenly she said, “Patterns.” Then she didn’t say anything more, and I tried to hear the squeak of the wheel.
Then she said, “He never would have left you. If he left he’d only come back again. And he never would have quit hitting you. And each time would be a little worse than the last.”
“It’s not always like it is on Oprah, Mama.”
“There’s things you don’t know,” she said.
“Like what?”
The squeaking of the wheel, the song of birds. She said, “You know how I lost the hearing in the one ear?”
“You had an infection.”
“That’s what I always told you. It’s not true. Your daddy cupped his hands and boxed my ears. He deafened me on the one side. I was lucky, nothing happened to the other ear. I still hear as good as ever out of it.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“It’s the truth, Tildie.”
“Daddy never hit you.”
“Your daddy hit me all the time,” she said. “All the time. He used his hands, he used his feet. He used his belt.”
I felt a tightening in my throat. “I don’t remember,” I said.
“You didn’t know. You were little. What do you think Livia knows? What do you think she’ll remember?”
We walked on a ways. I said, “I just remember the two of you hollering. I thought you hollered and finally he left. That’s what I always thought.”
/> “That’s what I let you think. It’s what I wanted you to think. I had a broken jaw, I had broken ribs, I had to keep telling the doctor I was clumsy, I kept falling down. He believed me, too. I guess he had lots of women told him the same thing.” We switched, and I took over the wheelbarrow. She said, “Dan would have done the same to you, if you hadn’t done what you did.”
“He wanted to stop.”
“They can’t stop, Tildie. No, not that way. To your left.”
“Aren’t we going to bury him alongside Grandma Yount?”
“No,” she said. “That’s too near the house. We’ll dig his grave across the stream, where the walnut grove is.”
“It’s beautiful there.”
“You always liked it.”
“So did Dan,” I said. I felt so funny, so light-headed. My world was turned upside down and yet it felt safe, it felt solid. I thought how Dan had itched to cut down those walnut trees. Now he’d lie forever at their feet, and I could come back here whenever I wanted to feel close to him.
“But he’ll be lonely here,” I said. “Won’t he? Mama, won’t he?”
The walnut trees lose their leaves early in the fall, and they put on less of a color show than the other hardwoods. But I like to come to the grove even when the trees are bare. Sometimes I bring Livia. More often I come by myself.
I always liked it here. I love our whole 220 acres, every square foot of it, but this is my favorite place, among these trees. I like it even better than the graveyard over by the pear and apple orchard. Where the graves have stones, and where the women and children of our family are buried.
Some Days You Get the Bear
Beside him, the girl issued a soft grunt of contentment and burrowed closer under the covers. Her name was Karin, with the accent on the second syllable, and she worked for a manufacturer of floor coverings, doing something unfathomable with a computer. They’d had three dates, each consisting of dinner and a screening. On their first two dates he’d left her at her door and gone home to write his review of the film they’d just seen. Tonight she’d invited him in.